Entertaindom

» see entertaindom.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Time Warner launched Entertaindom on 29 November 1999 and called it the first online entertainment network produced by a major media company. The pitch was the vault. Warner's animation library came over as Flash and new short films were commissioned from outside studios, with a layer of entertainment news pulled from Entertainment Weekly and CNN sitting over the top of it. Its own meta description promised celebrity gossip in the same breath as WB Classic Animation, which tells you how wide the net was meant to be.

It did not stay its own thing for long. Jim Moloshok and Jim Banister, the two executives who had built it, left suddenly, and in April 2000 Warner Bros. Online took entertaindom.com over and put both properties under one executive vice president of new media, Kevin Tsujihara, with shared overhead. Warner Bros. Online was the studio's branded site, the one with Looney Tunes and the film properties on it. Entertaindom was the edgier one, running third-party work from AtomFilms and Mondo Media.

The AOL Time Warner merger closed on 11 January 2001, carrying about a billion dollars of promised cost cuts with it. Variety reported that month that the studio was already discussing whether to shutter Entertaindom, with the decision expected within weeks. It went in February. The branded site won, and the content that had lived on Entertaindom drifted over to it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the sniffer page ~

The homepage in November 2000 is not a page. Open the archived capture and what loads is a VBScript function that calls CreateObject to see whether the browser can hold an ActiveX Flash control, followed by a JavaScript block that checks the plugins array on everything else, with a special branch for Macintosh Internet Explorer 4 and a fallback to a file called download_browser.jsp. Before you saw a single frame of anything, the site tested you.

That test is the reason a product like this was never really available in Turkey in 1999. Home internet here was a 33.6k modem on a phone line billed by the minute, and answering yes to a Flash check was the easy part. What sat behind the door was streaming video and animation, priced in bandwidth nobody in Ankara had. The whole category of media-company web portal arrived in this country years later, on broadband, by which time the companies that had tried it first were closed.

~ the second life of the domain ~

Warner never let the domain go. By 17 September 2001 entertaindom.com had stopped serving anything of its own and was answering with a 302 from a Netscape Enterprise server, pointing at www2.warnerbros.com/web/wboriginals/index.jsp, which at least still had something to do with what the site had been.

Today it answers with a 301 to www2.warnerbros.com/main/homepage/homepage.html. That URL returns a 404. Somebody at Warner has been renewing a dead dot-com brand for twenty-five years, and the destination it has been pointing at since the last time anyone touched the redirect is a page that no longer exists.

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